The Burkean Legacy and Composition; or, Five Dogs in Search of Meaning

Angelo Bonadonna

Presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication
Phoenix, March 1997

I begin with a word association exercise on the first part of my title, "The Burkean Legacy and Composition": the pentad; linguistic quizzicality; the comic attitude; logology; Dramatism; cultural valetudinarianism; perspective by incongruity; pure persuasion; (nonsymbolic) motion/(symbolic) action; entitlement; flowerishes; situations and strategies; dialectic; ad bellum purificandum. . . . Ultimately, of course, the legacy of Kenneth Burke must remain a matter to defy final naming or definition(despite the fine collection of essays that goes by that title, The Legacy of Kenneth Burke, published in 1989), but, reducing my scope somewhat, I propose to offer a catch-as-catch-can identification (there's another one!) of a useful idea Burke has left us teachers of composition in one of his more whimsical moments. The moment occurs after a rather probing discussion of Freud's concept of the unconscious, or rather, as we shall see, concepts in the unconscious of Freud's concept. It is a discussion of the "Five Dogs," one of Burke's more unusual terministic screens for his theory of the way words acquire multiple meanings.

One way to characterize the five dogs would be to call them atypically Burkean attempt to make "amends [for a difficult discussion] by reduction to a very simple anecdote" (RM 265). The essay that the dogs attempt to represent anecdotally--"Mind, Body, and the Unconscious"--takes Freud to task by indicating that the term "unconscious," as a dialectical counterpart to the term "conscious," can logically mean many more things than Freud addressed. Using Freud as a guide, Burke outlines the content and function of what we might call the "Dramatistic unconscious," a linguistic or formal kind of unconscious that Burke feels is endemic to the use of symbol systems in general.

Burke once described the reading of Freud "suggestive to the point of bewilderment" (PLF 258), but over the course of his career he quite clear-headedly indicated ways in which Freud's theories had a larger and perhaps more primary domain than that of psychology. In "Freud and the Analysis of Poetry" Burke took the lead in adapting Freudian principles to literary criticism by analyzing poetry in terms of "dream," "prayer," and "chart" (PLF 268). More to my point, in "Mind, Body, and the Unconscious," Burke suggests that everything that Freud said about symbolic action (his psychiatric study of "symptomatic action," "the symptoms of sick souls" [LSA 64, 72]) applied first and foremost to language in general, and then derivatively to human psychology. In the few pages of his essay, Burke extends the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious as a repository for repressed meanings; he does so by outlining eight additional categories of the unconscious (the eighth being a "catchall category") that his study of symbolic action would add to the psychiatric analysis of symbolic action.

Where Freud speaks of forgetting and repression, Burke speaks of universal linguistic processes: "the universal incorporation of the past within the present"; "the recallable but not explicitly recalled"; "the 'entelechial' kind of 'futurity' (as certain kinds of observations or conclusions may be implicit in a given terminology, quite in the sense that a grammar and syntax are implicit in a given language)"; "error, ignorance, uncertainty" (LSA 72)--and so on. He also mentions the "unconscious aspect of sheerly bodily process" (such as the healing of a scab) (LSA 67). Overall, he is led to conclude "that we learn language 'rationally' only by much forgetting (which necessarily involves an 'unconscious' of some sort)" (LSA 75). We forget the conditions that give rise to our meanings, but yet there remains something" inexorably 'unforgettable'" about the experience (LSA 75). There in the periphery, in the "Dramatistic unconscious," lies much linguistic action, not only the meanings that the poet would draw upon and the critic explicate, but the entire range of meanings that form our educational experiences. Burke suggests that the linguistic unconscious is a significant source of poetic creativity and that it often functions in as devious and wily a manner as Freud's Id--but his primary effort is to demonstrate the necessity of some kind of "unconsciousness," however it be categorized, for the sane and routine operation of language and understanding.

The need for a linguistic unconscious stems from the fact that we use words in endlessly variable contexts. Indeed there would be something horrible about language if it required us to remember every detail of every context of every usage of every word over the course of our lives. If such a situation were thinkable, language would be a burden that accumulated; each word would forever be acquiring new meanings, each one the existential product of the unique circumstances of the individual usage. But mercifully we forget and abstract; through the linguistic powers of analogy and identification we wash over the particularities of situations, as we give them common names. In essence, we become "unconscious" to the worlds of possible meaning forever flitting about every word.

The five dogs represent categories of unconscious meaning that can flit about our conscious use of words. As psychiatric therapy recovers meanings buried and encoded in the psychological unconscious, Burkean analysis--his canine taxonomy--identifies linguistic meanings buried, forgotten-and-unforgotten, in the various contextual and formal "unconsciouses" natural to language and its normal operation.

Burke's Five Dogs

There is no substitute for a Burkean reduction, and his page and a half presentation of the five dogs is both sufficiently succinct and charming to justify a full direct quotation:

So much for our tentative categories of the Unconscious. But where problems of terminology are concerned, we must always keep on the move. So, for a windup, let's try a different slant, having in mind both the psychoanalytic and Dramatistic concepts of "symbolic action."

Animalistically, there are many species of dogs. But Dramatistically, these reduce to five (not a single one of which might meet the requirements of a dog-fancier--or should we say, a dog-man?)

For finish, I would propose this other cut across our subject:

First, along psychoanalytic lines, there is the "primal" dog, the first dog you knew, or loved, or were frightened by, or lost. It secretly ties in with what the anthropologist Malinowski would call "context of situation." For though many or all of the details that are associated with that dog may have been forgotten (and thus become "unconscious"), we now know that they are still there within you somehow (and can be disclosed by drugs, hypnosis or psychoanalysis).

Next, there's the "jingle" dog. It concerns the sheerly accidental nature of the word "dog, "what it rhymes with in English as distinct from what the corresponding word rhymes with in other languages, and above all, in English, we might well keep in mind Cummings' undeniable observation that the jingle dog is "God spelled backwards." (Or did he say it the other way round?)

Third comes the "lexical" dog. This is the one defined in the dictionary, "by genus and differentia." It is the most public, normal, and rational of all dogs--and the emptiest of all, as regards the attitude of either poets or neurotics. If that great, good, sound, healthy, public meaning for "dog" were all we had, I can confidently assure you that the world would be completely clear of poetry. This is the only definition that wholly makes sense, if the world is to be kept going. But along with the fact that this definition of "dog" is tremendously necessary, there's also the fact that "dog" as so conceived is totally inane. You know what I mean. But if you want documentation besides, just track down all the references to dogs in Aeschylus' Oresteia (or see the pages on "dog" in William Empson's The Structure of Complex Words.)

Fourth, there's an "entelechial dog." This is the "perfect" dog towards which one might aspire. I might give a roundabout example of this sort: Beginning with the material substance, bread, let us next move to the word "bread." Once we have that word, through sheerly verbal manipulations we can arrive at a term for "perfect bread." Having got to that point, we find two quite different kinds of resources open to us. (1) We may feel disillusioned about "reality" because the thing bread falls so tragically short of the ideal that flits about our word for "perfect" bread. Or(2) we might be graced with the opportunity to discern, all around us, evidences of way whereby even the worst of bread embodies, however finitely, the principle of an infinitely and absolutely "perfect" bread. Dogs endowed with "personalities" in animal stories would be a fictional variant of such an &qotentelechial" motive. In their way, they are "perfect" embodiments of certain traits. Lassie has been the Machinery's prime exhibit, as regards the entelechial dog.

Finally, there is the "tautological" dog. We here have in mind the fact that a dog involves a particular set of associations which, in a sense, reproduce his "spirit." For instance: kennel, dog food, master, the hunt, cat, protection, loyalty, slavishness, the place where the dog was killed, and so on. When I was young, I always had a dog, and I always thought of lions as big dogs. It was quite a blow to me when I first learned that lions are really big cats. Looking back, I incline to believe that I had a "cycle" or "ladder" of terms, running from dog, to boy, to father, to lion, to king (or generally, ruler or authority),to God. Here would be a "tautological" terminology in the sense I now have in mind.

Our five dogs overlap considerably, I concede. But there are terministic situations when each is most directly to be considered in its own right, though we should always keep the whole lot in mind, when inquiring into the relations between the overt symbol and its possible dissolvings into the "Where is it?" of the Unconscious. (LSA 73-4)

Uses of the Dogs

Brenda Kuseski has identified the usefulness of Burke's five dogs as a critical method for analyzing speeches that "are compelling, even superbly so, yet on grounds other than the cerebral" (324). Kuseski contends that "such speeches" as, for instance, Mother Teresa's Nobel acceptance speech "defy the usual tools of critical assessment, for argument and logical development do not account for their power" (324). Through analysis based on the linguistic principles of Burke's five dogs, Kuseski examines how Mother Teresa's speech--while possessing a form that "is rambling and seemingly unfocused, disjointed, and apparently redundant" (323)--nevertheless" reaches Burkean dramatistic completeness in its key term"--love(328).

My interest here considers the usefulness of the five dogs from he perspective of pedagogy, rather than critical analysis. Specifically, I wish to present an outline of a writing lesson I have used in connection with an assignment from William Covino's composition textbook, Forms of Wondering: A Dialogue on Writing for Writers. This textbook, perhaps the only one (besides those of Plato) written entirely as a dialogue, is probably our most thoroughly postmodern composition text. The book "presents writing and reading as ways to keep thinking, and wondering"--instead of as ways to "stop thinking" or to "close the subject" (ix). In asking the student to explore and write about the nature of writing, the book enacts a dialogue among a host of historical personages--Plato, Montaigne, and Tom Wolfe, to name a few--as well as a series of different voices that makeup the author's complex attitude toward writing (Covino the Sophist, Covino the Expediter, Covino the Epistemologist, Covino the TV Watcher, etc.).

At one point in the discussion Covino the Writing Teacher suggests that definitions are the "'building blocks' of dialectical writing"(118). As he attempts to explain this statement, an argument ensues about the nature of meaning: should definitions change and compete with one another or should we, as Covino the Administrator suggests, strive for common definitions, reflecting "shared stable standards" (119)? The Sophist "closes" the matter by providing impressive evidence that "uniform, common definitions" (119)are not possible--and the Writing Teacher caps off the dispute with a writing assignment, the "portfolio of definitions"--an assignment that requires students to define and redefine a selected ambiguous term over the course of several weeks.

The assignment requires students to add five new definitions a week to their portfolio, along with comments as to how they found their definitions and what they think constitutes the underlying motivation of each definition. After the students have spent three weeks or so interviewing sources, researching, and gathering definitions, I introduce the five dogs. Of a sudden, many students who felt they had reached the end of the line have at their disposal four additional types of definition (by then the lexical dog had been pretty much exhausted).

After a reading of Burke's five dogs and an explanation of them as categories of meaning, I illustrate how the dogs can be used for their portfolios of definitions by sharing with the class the definitions I've composed for my chosen term, "soft drink." With the aid of some examples, those students who had been mystified by Burke's unconventional style quickly come to see the commonsense validity of his five categories of meaning. In the spirit of such clarification, I present below something of a grab bag of exemplifications, teacher background notes, methods, and Burkology related to this lesson, dog by dog:

1. The Primal Dog: The difficulty of writing about one's primal "dog" (or "soft drink," or whatever term one investigates) is that, if it is a true primal dog, it resides in the unconscious and thus must be "retrieved" somehow into consciousness. Burke says the primal dog "can be disclosed by drugs, hypnosis or psychoanalysis"--none of which are viable classroom options. So as a compromise, I ask my students to explore their earliest memories of their chosen term. They readily grasp the notion that one's first encounters with objects and situations tend to color subsequent experience in a way that is both personal and meaningful. So I tell them about my primal soft drink, 7-Up:

I am a child of seven or eight, looking up at my grandfather as he grasped the green bottle, ready to pour. I have an indelible image of the bottle twisting and his carpenter's muscles flexing beneath a forest of curly white hair. The sense of expectation tingled as the (eventually-to-be-defined-as-) "un-cola's" bubbles danced in the air and lightly sprinkled my face.

But you must understand this was not any kind of expectation--it was expectation for satisfaction in an illicit, forbidden pleasure. For my parents didn't allow us children to have sodas just any old time, as "Nonno" did. So there we were, sealing the bond, drinking the ritualistic cup--setting ourselves in league against the others, as only grandparents and grandchildren can.

And even though 7-Up has lost the graphic charm of its ancient bottles, even though I've drunk many pale substitutes and even the ever-offensive Diet 7-Up, the primal magic is still there. I cannot drink a soda without the venerable spirits of this primal soft drink--and my grandfather, and our crime, and the scene of the crime (summers at Nonno's cottage in Pell Lake, Wisconsin)--rising up and dancing around the cup.

2. The Jingle Dog: Definition by way of the jingle dog often comes as a surprise. By nature the jingle dog is accidental. It involves meanings or effects that arise primarily not out of the lexical meaning or significance of the term but out of the sheerly accidental nature of the word's graphical or sound qualities. To put it in other Burkean terms, it is meaning that arises not out of the term's idea so much as its image. Earlier when I wrote "the five dogs represent categories" I fell under the spell of the jingle dog and almost interjected the word "dogegories" as the fitting substitute for "categories." This dog is subject to doggerel, indeed. But that is how it operates--it makes connections and transformations in the magical realm of poetry in general, and the pun in particular. The jingle dog also operates on a visual level, the clearest example being the artistic use of fonts and lettering to convey meaning (as when, for instance, a horror movie's title attempts to simulate fear with jagged and bloodied letters).

For Burkean examples of the jingle dog, one need but page through Burke's published letters to Malcolm Cowley. His unpublished letters, according to William Rueckert, are likewise a treasure-trove of jingle dog antics: "[Burke's] letters are usually written in a combination of standard orthography and Burke orthography, which is a phonetic manipulation that allows him to exploit every pun he can think of as he writes" ("Rereading" 255).

Throughout his career, Burke theorized about the linguistic effects that constitute the jingle dog, particularly in The Philosophy of Literary Form (51-66,258-271, 369-378) and in A Rhetoric of Motives (310). His most focused discussion of such effects is perhaps found in his essay, "On Musicality in Verse" (PLF 369-78). There, using Coleridge's poetry for illustrations, he defines the processes of "concealed alliteration by cognate" phonemes, consonantal acrostic, chiasmus, augmentation, and dimunition. The most noteworthy critical tool Burke developed as a result of his jingle dog speculations was the procedure he called "joycing"--"the deliberate and systematic coaching of [tonal] transformations for heuristic purposes" (RM 310)--the method whereby he made his infamous "discovery" that the final line of Keats' "Grecian Ode" could be rendered "body is turd, turd body." Burke was always quick to discount the "truth" of any insight achieved by such methods, but, citing the value of the lapsus linguae in Freud's work and the use of "ablaut" transformation in Hopkins as significant instances, he insisted that the resources of language as such encouraged the making of such meanings as well as the critical search for them.

Rather than take my class too deeply into Burke's theories of musicality and tonal transformation, I merely encourage my students to look for rhymes, puns, palindromes, and alliterations--any kind of word play they have heard or can create about their chosen word. The results may involve commentary (as Burke's dog-God example) or a series of fragments--a list of possible jingles on a theme. Often this dog proves most difficult for students, not only because it is so dependent on chance but also because it typically manifests itself in momentary snippets. The dearth of examples for my chosen word reflects the difficulties. But even so, we might ask just how much of Coca Cola's success is due to the jingle dog. From the start, this company has been shrewdly aware of the commercial benefits of alliteration, assonance, and rhythm--not to mention the right logo--and it is the jingle dog who is responsible for the pleasing syncopated rhythm of the "always Coca Cola" refrain in the recent musical jingle for the soft drink.

In passing we might note the presence of the jingle dog in the regional term "pop," and in the name for a highball made with Seagrams 7 and 7-Up, "seven-seven."

Ultimately, this category of meaning is dependent on the degree to which one is poetically inspired and to which one's materials possess some resonance. Despite its difficulties, it is the category for which a few students in every class write the most. And though it proves a difficult category to write on upon demand, it is one that all students, once instructed, readily recognize and identify spontaneously throughout the remainder of the semester.

3. The Lexical Dog: This dog requires no explanation to students. What might be highlighted to them is the fact that though this is the category for the "great, good, sound, healthy, public meaning for 'dog,'" it by no means, at least in most cases, provides a simple, agreed upon or "definitive" meaning for terms. In Forms of Wondering, Covino the Sophist indicates how difficult it is to come up with "a uniform common definition of effective writing" (119) by surveying the range of meanings in the dictionary for the word "effective." He points out that, besides the separate clauses, each word in each clause is subject to multiple meanings, producing various permutations of meaning. In its separate clauses, a dictionary definition layers meanings atop or astride other meanings, giving us side by side standard, non-standard, etymological, historical, special case, and archaic meanings, along with context, usage, and regional notes. Burke calls the lexical dog "the emptiest of all"--even so, any self-respecting dictionary is a multi-volume and quite garrulous document.

My students enjoy the break the lexical dog affords, for I instruct them merely to copy the definitions of their terms out of the dictionary, as below:

4. The Entelechial Dog: First, I should offer some explanation of Burke's use of the term "entelechy":

The term is a Dramatistic version of Aristotle's concept of "entelechy" and it increasingly played a prominent role in Burke's later formulations on the nature of language. In Dramatism and Development he explains that "by 'entelechy' I refer to such use of symbolic resources that potentialities can be said to attain their perfect fulfillment" (39). He refers to his "Definition of Man" which contains a "wry codicil" that describes humankind as "rotten with perfection." He explains the codicil as follows:

The principle of perfection is central to the nature of language as motive. The mere desire to name something by its "proper" name, or to speak a language in its distinctive ways is intrinsically" perfectionist." What is more &quo

. . . There is a principle of perfection implicit in the nature of symbol systems; and in keeping with his nature as symbol-using animal, man is moved by this principle. (LSA 16-17)

Efforts expended in realizing a "form" (a poem, a Euclidean proof, the telling of a joke), any striving toward completion (of a puzzle, of a quandary in life, of one's purpose in life), all attempts to act with propriety, to do the right thing, partake of the linguistic motive of entelechy in Burke's view.

Burke often cited Hitler, (who defined the Jew as the "perfect" enemy), as the "perfect" example of the danger ever implicit in the entelechial motive. Burke was a lifelong critic of demagogues and their perfectionist doctrines of world domination or personal salvation. But his main point about entelechy concerns its prevalence in human thought at all levels. So in helping my students compose entelechial definitions for their chosen terms, I bring to class a book by Kurt Andersen, The Real Thing, to provide models.

Anderson's book is "perfect" for the purpose of illustrating the prevalence of entelechial thinking, for the book is a dictionary of "perfectionist" definitions of very ordinary components of American culture. Andersen defines a "real thing" as "a species' essential type. It's the one thing that most manifests the thing-hood of a given category of things, a quiddity" (x)--in other words, an entelechial dog. But Andersen's book is more brash and playful than philosophical in the traditional sense. The Real Thing defines the entelechial thing in cars, names, desserts, Charlie Chans, proverbs, illegal drugs, boring countries, industrial food, mass murderers, festivals, unpleasant surprises, insects, liberal issues, specious historical analogies, television game shows, saints, days of the week, and so on. For instance, under his first entry, "Beers," Andersen writes:

Budweiser is the real thing . . . but Anheuser-Busch has it all wrong; Bud isn't the king of beers, it's more like the citizen or infantryman of beers. This is democracy! Our forefathers fought a war for freedom from the yoke of Old World opp

The real thing in soft drinks, of course, is Coke. Even Andersen says so, though grudgingly. "Pepsi wins on points. But not on essences" (39)--and so on. But it should be clear that the great fun in writing on the entelechial dog is the whimsy it invites. Students come to see that one individual's entelechy is another's rottenness. Students learn they need to make a case for this or that perfection; and the exercise--in its more perfect moments--provides students with an important opportunity to reflect on the arbitrariness of criteria.

5. The Tautological Dog: If the entelechial dog implies both Aristotle and Burke's theories of form, the tautological dog recalls Burke's logological reading of the first three chapters of Genesis in his Rhetoric of Religion, particularly his chart on page 184 depicting the "Tautological Cycle of Terms for 'Order.'" Burke explains that when we treat a cluster of terms (like those implied in the idea of "order") "philosophically," as opposed to "narratively," the terms can be said to mutually imply one another "cyclically"--in any "order"--as logical counterparts. Any term of the cluster, if one is thorough enough in tracking down its implications, will eventually lead to each of the other terms. Burke analyzes how the terms implicit in the idea of order--governance, sin, covenant, fall, act, will, redemption, victimage, dominion, and so on--all imply one another and thus are partial restatements (tautologies) for one another. Since the relationship of tautological terms is logical, they can be said to revolve around one another "endlessly" (RR 183)--whereas when they are translated into a particular narrative order they become locked in an irreversible sequence (as the "story" will only work narratively if the establishment of the covenant precedes the breaking of the covenant (sin), which then paves the way for redemption, and so on).

To approach the topic via a "perspective by incongruity," we might compare Burke's tautological dog to the science of cloning. The premise of cloning, as well as Burke's notion of tautology, is the idea that the part can contain enough implicit information for reconstructing a whole of some sort. Whether or not this is an appropriate metaphor for Burke's ideas about tautological cycles of terms, the literary version of cloning--the figure of speech having to do with parts and wholes, synecdoche--was so important to Burke's thought that he called it the "'basic' figure of speech" (PLF 26). Part and whole are "tautologically" related in Burke's dialectic, since either can stand for the other, and both partake of the same "spirit."

The tautological is perhaps the subtlest (most unconscious?)of the dogs since it involves a chain of associations, or "symbols" for the chosen term, that can range quite far. Tautologically for soft drink we get: refreshment, sweat, Mountain Dew commercials, condensation (which brings us back to Freud), vitality, death (both as the opposite of vitality and the slaking of thirst),soda jerk, the multinational corporation, Andy Warhol's Coke bottles (and thus "Pop" art in general), and so on.

In composing their tautological dogs, I invite students to pursue any possible "radiating" terms as opportunities for reflection or connection with other themes they have explored in their portfolio.

The Significance of the Five Dogs for the Composition Class

This assignment of course has its limitations. The student's chosen term should probably be a noun, and, considering the nature of the primal dog, it should be a noun that is part of a very young child's vocabulary. Ultimately, a well-done exercise in the five dogs is a tour de force. I have approached the assignment with a "let's see what you come up with" attitude. Students are always skeptical of this approach, but I have seen them produce some stunning definitions as a result of it, on a variety of terms, such as car, scissors, home, toy, door, mother, tree, story, pencil, and so on.

Training in the five dogs can lead to writing that is disjointed, fragmentary, and random. Or it can lead to polished essays. But that is not its primary purpose. I submit the dogs, essentially, as a composition exercise. Even so, I would stress its importance, as it is grounded in and suggestive of significant attitudinal and methodological considerations. Attitudinally, the exercise helps students become more comfortable with the inevitable ambiguity of meaning that attends the complex understanding of anything; methodologically, it offers a means of control by pointing out some typical directions into which the ambiguities can be channeled.

In all, the five dogs are a representative case of Kenneth Burke's lifelong project of "linguistic quizzicality," his bemused, skeptical, appreciative, and sometimes fearful investigation into the kind of things that happens when animals begin using symbols (GM 442-3). We might close quizzically enough with a final observation: often in his writings and everywhere in his attitude, Burke pled for a "many-termed view of reality"("FAT" 365)--for only could such a view accurately gauge the complexity of things. This was Burke's moralistic goal, or the way to his goal of ad bellum purificandum. The five dogs, however, remind us that even if we achieve that state of many terms, our work has just begun, for just what is the meaning of each of those terms?